THE YEAR 1000 AND THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE CRUSADES
The passion of the nineteenth century has been the study of origins. Our historians of the Crusades, seeking a starting-point, have been prone to find one (though not the only one) in a panic of terror said to have fallen upon Christendom as it neared the close of the first thousand years of its existence—a belief that the world would end with the year 1000.
Thus Michaud, at the opening of the century; thus Archer, at its closing. Even Heinrich von Sybel, whose epoch-making history of the First Crusade opened a new era of critical study in this field, and who, in the revised edition published in 1881, could with just pride congratulate himself that in the forty years since its first appearance its main conclusions had been adopted by all leading scholars, and could hope that "perhaps in another forty years they will have the fortune to find a place in the manuals and the textbooks," tells us still in this new edition that
As the first thousand years of our calendar drew to an end, in every land of Europe the people expected with certainty the destruction of the world. Some squandered their substance in riotous living, others bestowed it for the salvation of their souls on churches and convents, bewailing multitudes lay by day and by night about the altars, many looked with terror, yet most with a secret hope, for the conflagration of the earth and the falling of the heavens."
Alas for human fallibility! The legend which he thus re-echoes had within the decade been already twice refuted, and with a conclusiveness more crushing than his own exposure of the legends of the First Crusade. In the score of years that since has passed Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon have even in manual and text-book begun to take the background. Is it not time, now that three further critics have sifted, and with the same result, the legend of the year 1000, that it should vanish from our thought of the Crusades? And could we find a better moment for its study
Read, at the late annual meeting of the American Historical Association, as the opening paper of a session devoted to the Crusades and the East.
H. V. Sybel, Geschichte dss ersten Kreiizziigs (2te, neu bearbeitele Auflage, Leipzig,, 188l), p. 150.
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